Better Than Good.

Workslop: worse but more

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In November 1955, a naval historian named C. Northcote Parkinson opened a satirical essay in The Economist with a line that outlasted everything else he wrote. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. His example was an elderly lady who spent an entire day posting a single card to her niece, a task a busy person would finish in three minutes on the way to lunch.

Foomers vs doomers: skilled incompetence and the AI tug of war

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

foom-er, noun, an ironic malapropism playing on doomerism (AGI fatalists) and FOMO (hustle bros), used to describe techno-optimists. Reflects the onomatopoeic “slowly, then all at once” nature of exponential growth: “AI go foom.”

Forward Deployed Engineers: AI’s hired guns

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The last mile of AI deployment is a real person, sitting in your office, learning your business, writing your plumbing, and making things work reliably. That will remain human for the foreseeable future.

The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The sorting machine was built to cope with a genuine problem. Where it went wrong was in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness, in assuming that the ability to process resumes fast meant the ability to evaluate candidates well. The fix is not a smarter machine but a more modest one, paired with humans who are given the time, the tools, and the structured information to do what they were always better at.

Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The promise of a tool that gives you similar search visibility to the pre-agent world is understandably seductive. But before you eagerly hand over your cash for a platform, consider whether an afternoon’s work a month might be a more cost-effective alternative.

Another nice mess

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in your business right now, someone is assembling a picture that no single app can provide. It may be the project manager pulling hours from Harvest and budget data from the finance tool to assess whether the engagement is still viable. Maybe it’s you on a Sunday, because what you need is not any one number from a system, but the pattern across three of them. The cloud gave small businesses access to the best software they had ever had, priced monthly and built for specific purposes. But twenty years of sensibly chosen apps have left the average small business with a patchwork data estate. That was tolerable until it wasn’t. AI has made tackling this lurking issue urgent.

The state and the machine

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What little we saw of Fable and Mythos offers both cause for excitement and concern. It was widely and credibly seen as a model of a completely different caliber from those that had come before. Perhaps the risks in this instance were overstated or amplified for political ends. What is more profound is that the short time we had with the models offered a clear glimpse of a future in which a single company is making significant progress toward a superintelligence with the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation-states or even massive corporations. That juncture was never going to arrive smoothly or without consequences.

We have ways of making you pay

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The true cost of AI work is hard to measure; the value of AI work is also hard to measure, and metering changes which of those two blindnesses you notice first. It drags the cost into the light, itemised and arriving monthly, while the value stays diffuse, lagging and easy to argue about. That asymmetry is exactly why the panic is showing up now, ahead of any definitive verdict on whether the spending was worth it.

Bloated: how chat made you fat

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It helps to remember the time you save generating a document is not free. It is borrowed from every person who has to read it, at interest, and the longer the distribution list the worse the rate of return.

Apple’s bicycle without a chain

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. Apple Intelligence so far is more like a bicycle with no chain. The frame is gorgeous, and the engineering is extraordinary, but you cannot get far with it.

The ten trillion dollar gamble

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In November 2025, on stage at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event, the chief financial officer of OpenAI was asked how her company planned to honor roughly $1.4 trillion in compute contracts on $13 billion of revenue. Sarah Friar said she was looking to assemble a network of banks, private equity, and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee.” By the following evening, she had posted to LinkedIn explaining that “backstop” had muddied the point, that what she meant was something more like a public-private partnership, and that the United States government has been “incredibly forward-leaning” on AI as a strategic asset. The post was titled in such a way as to suggest someone had explained, gently, what the original phrase implied.

Never talk about goblins

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Buried in a JSON file that OpenAI posted to GitHub recently, inside the configuration for its newest coding agent, sits an instruction that reads like a footnote written by someone losing their composure. “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” The line appears more than once. Whoever wrote it wanted to be sure the model understood.

Read the frickin’ manual: the end of the user interface

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When a new sales rep joins a company, whilst manuals and process documents probably exist somewhere in varying degrees of obsolescence, in practice the rep just asks where the opportunity stage field lives. Someone on the team shows them. A few months in, the same rep is teaching the next hire. The institutional knowledge of how to use the CRM reproduces itself like a folk song.

Attention is all you ever needed

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For seventy years, a generation of management consultants has repeated Joseph Juran’s line about the vital few and the trivial many as though it described a permanent feature of commercial life. 20% of customers generate 80% of revenue. 20% of products account for 80% of sales. 20% of bugs cause 80% of errors, as Steve Ballmer once put it in a famous 2002 memo.

The cost of everything and value of nothing

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nobody knows what a token will cost in five years. Nobody knows how many tokens a single user will burn through in a working day, or whether the word “token” will even still mean what it means now once models have been carved up, distilled, and pushed to the edge. We know roughly the shape of the spreadsheet. We have no idea what goes in the cells.

Go to the actual place and see the actual thing

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in a Toyota plant in the early 1950s, a young engineer stood inside a chalk circle drawn on the factory floor. Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, had put him there with a single instruction. Watch. No clipboard, no agenda, just observe what happens in front of you, and do not leave until you can tell me something I did not already know.

Climbing the Claude ladder: from prompting to orchestrating

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most people using Claude are stuck on the first rung of a very tall ladder. They open a chat, type a question, get an answer, and move on with their day. Which is fine, but it’s a bit like buying a full workshop and only using the tape measure.

The path to an agent-first web

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For three decades, the web has operated on an implicit contract between the people who build websites and the people who visit them. You design pages for human eyes and organise information for human brains, monetising attention through ads, upsells, and sticky navigation patterns that keep visitors scrolling just a little longer. The browser was a viewport, the click was the unit of intent, and the entire economic architecture of digital commerce grew up around a single assumption, that your next visitor would be a person.

Snake oil, SEO, and the GEO chimera

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Update, 21 May 2026.

Automating your marketing 01: Paid Search Ads

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Google has always wanted you to believe that running search ads is simple and not as complex as it actually is. Set a budget (a generous one!), choose some keywords, and let the machine handle the rest. To be fair, the machine has become exceptionally good at certain aspects of the task. However, the gap between what Google automates effectively and what still needs human oversight is where most advertising budgets get lost.

Why AI models hallucinate

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In September 2025, OpenAI published a paper that said something the AI industry already suspected but hadn’t quite articulated. The paper, “Why Language Models Hallucinate”, authored by Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nachum, Santosh Vempala, and Edwin Zhang, didn’t just catalogue the problem. It pointed the finger at the evaluation systems that are supposed to keep models honest and argued that those systems are actively making hallucination worse.

Received wisdom: classic frameworks under AI pressure 01: David C Baker

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

David C Baker has spent thirty years telling agency owners something they already suspected but lacked the courage to act on. You are not expensive enough, not focused enough in what you do. You are not sufficiently authoritative with your clients. The issue is not your work. The issue is the position from which you sell it.

The trust problem that you already solved

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every developer who has spent time with AI coding tools carries the same low-grade anxiety. You ask the model to build something, it hands you back a file, and then you stare at it like a customs inspector wondering whether the suitcase has a false bottom. Line by line, function by function, you trace through the logic looking for the thing that will blow up in production at 2am on a Saturday. It is exhausting, and it is also, if you think about it for more than ten seconds, a problem you solved years ago in a completely different context.

Received wisdom: classic frameworks under AI pressure 02: Crabtree’s LER

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What happens to the labour efficiency ratio when labour isn’t the bottleneck?

The production agent stack for sensitive environments: a field guide for 2026

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What to actually deploy when mistakes carry consequences, and what to skip when they don’t.

Yes, the models got dumber

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In March 2023, GPT-4 could identify prime numbers with 97.6% accuracy. By June, that figure had cratered to 2.4%. Not a rounding error, not a minor regression, but a 95-point collapse on the same task with the same prompts. If a bridge lost 95% of its load-bearing capacity in three months, someone would go to prison. In AI, the vendor posts a changelog and moves on.

The sunk cost of being good at something

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular conversational move that has become common in discussions about AI. Someone demonstrates a new capability, shares a use case, or describes how their workflow has changed, and a familiar response arrives. What about security? What about governance? What about the hallucination problem? What about my twenty years of experience? Each objection arrives wearing the costume of legitimate concern, and each one contains enough truth to feel reasonable in the moment. But taken together, they form something that looks less like careful analysis and more like a defence mechanism.

The flatness of the machine

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can feel it before you can name it. A paragraph arrives, fluent and frictionless, and something in the back of your reading brain flinches. The sentences are grammatically flawless, the structure orderly, the tone warm but not too warm, authoritative but not too authoritative. It reads the way a hotel room looks, everything is there, nothing is wrong, and yet the text has no texture, no grain, no evidence that a particular person with particular opinions sat down and hammered it out. It is prose that has been to finishing school and learned nothing except how to be inoffensive at dinner.

Meta and Stripe want you to buy things from ads again

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meta and Stripe announced this week that they have built a native checkout experience inside Facebook ads, powered by Stripe’s infrastructure and the buyer’s saved Meta wallet credentials. A user sees an ad, taps “Buy now,” and purchases the item without leaving Facebook. If you have been in digital marketing for more than five years, you will notice this looks remarkably like the social commerce experiment Meta killed in June. The difference, apparently, is that this time it runs on something called the Agentic Commerce Protocol.

Meta’s GEM: what the largest ads foundation model means for your marketing

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meta has been quietly building something significant. Most marketers haven’t fully grasped the importance because it has been wrapped in machine learning jargon and engineering blog posts.

The narrow window for probabilistic agents

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can see the exact moment it goes wrong. The CIO sits through a vendor demo, watches an “AI agent” process a support ticket, look up an order, apply a returns policy, issue a refund, and send a confirmation email. It is slick, fast, and in every meaningful way, a workflow automation disguised in a language model’s trenchcoat. Each step follows a rule, and each rule was written by a human. The agent is not reasoning under uncertainty. It is executing a script, like a very expensive macro that can spell.

Your org chart is not your AI strategy

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve spent any time in enterprise technology over the past two decades, you’ll recognise the pattern immediately. A new category of tool emerges. Employees start using it because it makes their working lives easier. IT discovers this unsanctioned adoption, panics about security and compliance, and responds by trying to lock everything down. A period of organisational friction follows, during which the people who were already getting value from the tool become increasingly frustrated, while IT attempts to build a sanctioned alternative.

Software was never meant to last forever

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of frustration that anyone who has worked inside a mid-sized organisation will recognise. You are eighteen months into a Salesforce implementation. The original scope was clean and reasonable. But somewhere around month four, somebody realised that your sales process doesn’t quite match the way Salesforce thinks a sales process should work.

The machine that improves the machine

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2025, Google DeepMind released AlphaEvolve, an AI system that discovers better algorithms by evolving code through thousands of iterations. Within months, it had already optimised parts of Google’s data centre operations, improved hardware chip designs, and, most tellingly, accelerated the training of the very language models that power it. That last detail deserves considerably more than a footnote, because when an AI system starts making the tools used to build AI systems faster and cheaper, you are looking at a feedback loop that will change how the next generation of large language models gets built.

The vibe coding spectrum: from weekend hacks to the dark factory

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago, Andrej Karpathy posted a tweet that would come to define how an entire industry talks about itself. “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’” he wrote, “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” He described asking for trivial UI changes through voice commands, accepting all suggestions without reading the diffs, and copy-pasting error messages back into the chat until things worked. “It’s not really coding,” he admitted. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”

A $10K Mac Studio won’t replace your API bill

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Caveat: this article contains a detailed examination of the state of open source/ weight AI technology that is accurate as of February 2026. Things move fast.

Claude Opus 4.6 just shipped agent teams. But can you trust them?

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.6 this week. The headline features are strong: a 1M token context window (a first for Opus models), 128K output tokens, adaptive thinking that adjusts reasoning depth to the task, and top-of-the-table benchmark scores across coding, finance, and long-context retrieval. It scored 65.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, the highest ever recorded on that agentic coding evaluation (Anthropic, 2026).

Out of context: strategies for managing agent memory

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The ongoing contest in AI technology—a “strange arms race”—is the relentless expansion of the context window, which is the maximum input size for a large language model. This arms race is driven by the persistent notion that a larger context equals greater intelligence and capability. For example, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro now supports a million tokens, Anthropic’s Claude can handle 200,000, and OpenAI continually increases GPT-4’s limit. The promise is clear: if you feed the machine your entire codebase, legal documents, or a complete novel, it will analyse the material with flawless, almost divine understanding. However, the reality is that the technology does not yet meet this promise.

Escaping prototype purgatory: where is AWS for AI agents?

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This question has been running around my brain for a while, driven by two factors. First, building robust, production-ready enterprise agents that can handle scale, complexity and security is hard and complicated. Second, what if we could kind of abstract away all of that complexity in the way that AWS was so successful at?

The Hot Mess: large AI models and the scaling mirage

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a chart circulating among machine-learning circles that, depending on your outlook, will either alarm you or confirm something you have long suspected about the computers that are, at this point, writing our code, summarising our meetings, and helping decide who gets bail. The chart appears in a paper presented at ICLR 2026 by Alexander Hägele, Aryo Pradipta Gema, and several collaborators, including Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, of Anthropic, and it does something that researchers have been oddly hesitant to do.

Tooling around: letting agents do stuff is hard

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a messy reality of giving AI agents tools to work with. This is particularly true given that the Model Control Protocol (MCP) has become the default way to connect AI models to external tools. This has happened faster than anyone expected, and faster than the security aspects could keep up.

Building a simple agent with Claude

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article covers how to build a simple AI agent using Claude, using a hypothetical sales function as a worked example.

How Claude Code and Cowork talk to your other systems

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anthropic’s products have become the most aggressive movers in the race to connect AI to the messy sprawl of software that runs modern businesses. Claude Code talks to GitHub, Sentry, Postgres, and Jira. Cowork reads your local files, pulls data from your CRM, and drafts messages in Slack. The connective tissue for all of it is MCP, the Model Context Protocol, and it’s useful to understand what is happening beneath the surface.

Security for production AI agents in 2026

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This article represents the state of the art as of January 2026. The field evolves rapidly. Validate specific implementations against current documentation.

In the jungle: a reality check on AI agents

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of my all-time favourite films is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The making of the film, however, was a carnival of catastrophe, itself captured in the excellent documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. There’s a quote from the embattled director that captures the essence of the film’s travails:

AI governance: between the committee and the catastrophe

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every large organisation deploying AI currently faces two failure modes. Moving too slowly by requiring extensive committee approvals and detailed risk assessments causes the technology to become outdated before it can deliver results. Conversely, moving too quickly by allowing engineers to deploy models with minimal oversight risks issues such as systematic discrimination—for example, a credit algorithm unfairly targeting women for six months while compliance teams are still drafting policies.

AI slop: psychology, history, and the problem of the ersatz

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2025, the term “slop” emerged as the dominant descriptor for low-quality AI-generated output. It has quickly joined our shared lexicon, and Merriam-Webster’s human editors chose it as their Word of the Year.

Why AI agents keep forgetting things, and the race to fix it

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Iain Harper) — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ask ChatGPT something on Monday and return on Wednesday, and it will greet you with the warmth of a stranger. It has no recollection of your project, preferences, or the three hours you spent refining a prompt together. This amnesia is not a flaw in the traditional sense but a constraint inherent to how large language models operate. They process text within a fixed-size window, and when that window closes, everything inside it disappears.

The missiles are the destination

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of my uncommon enjoyments is the work that happens right in the middle of a big problem that needs to be solved, or even a nosedive. A calmness kicks in, the path gets clearer and I can usually tunnel vision my way through to course correction.

Fall back

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What creative studios and dev shops (and probably everyone else, too) need to do to stay relevant in the AI era without becoming commoditized slop.

The stuff between

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Simply put, your service business in its most raw form look something like this:

Zero busy work

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI has given us a lot of things. When used incorrectly, your brain turns to mush. When used correctly, it frees you to be original, strategic and creative.

Principles and systems to optimize your service business

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the greatest challenges in starting and owning a service business is the shift from doing the work to building the business that does the work, and then optimizing that business to be better than everyone else doing similar work.

The road to Braindrop

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the majority of 2024 considering my next chapter.

Hello, world!

mail@betterthangood.xyz (Garrett Winder) — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I sat behind the wheel of a fresh new website.